The illustrative embodiments described in the present application are useful in systems including those for routing items and more particularly are useful in systems including those for processing, routing and delivering incoming mail as imaged documents in electronic form.
Traditional mail extraction and scanning systems have been described including the Extraction and Scanning System described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,196,393 B1, issued Mar. 6, 2000 to Kruk, Jr., et al. and incorporated by reference herein. In the Kruk system, documents are sequentially opened and scanned before the next document is opened in order to maintain transactional integrity in a single record file. The transaction record files may then be stored as batches. Typical transactional extraction and scanning systems are used for processing check payments. However, the emergence of biochemical and other threats to the mail stream have led to mail digitizing and delivery systems.
Conventional mail scanning and delivery systems utilize a manually operated process requiring that each mail piece be scanned into an electronic image form. Thereafter, an operator decides how to route the document. The operator may manually select the addressee name viewed on the document from an email recipient name database and then initiate a new mail message attaching the electronic image of the mail piece.